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In the aftermath of the
attacks at the Manchester
Arena in May 2017 and at London
Bridge the following month, I felt that I wanted to take a closer look at
data relating to terrorist attacks across Europe. At a purely personal level, my
hope was to discern patterns and provide a broader context for my own
understanding. In searching for a suitable data asset, I encountered the Terrorism in Europe
Wikipedia page. The data doesn’t attempt to cover every incident, limiting
itself to those where 10 or more people (including the perpetrators) died. It
also consciously defines actions by State actors as beyond the definition of
terrorism – a nuance lost on some critics of both the dashboard and the
underlying data. The Data One chief attraction
from the point of view of creating a visualisation is that the data in the Wiki
article was relatively clean and needed relatively little tweaking to make
serviceable. I’m always nervous about dates in Tableau, so I spent some time
breaking the Wiki fo…